The Icon and the Axe

For the troubled aristocracy the image of Russia as a ship had long cejtsgdjtoj)eji comforting QngJMagnitsky UkenedlmT^ns^^r^lexinore7 I to "a ship without a rudder, moved about by every gust of wind";7 and Alexander's former tutor, La Harpe, darkly warned that "we are passengers in the boat of revolution. We must either reach the shore or sink."8 Not long before committing suicide, Radishchev likened the old order to "a ship hurled on the reef," and helped turn the aristocratic imagination away from the image of the ship to that of the sea itself. History, he declared, is moving into "a wild watery abyss . . . into an ocean where neither boundaries nor banks can be seen."9 Lunin later likened his thoughts to "storms at

sea";10 and Turgenev compared the romantic flight abroad under Nicholas to the original search of the Eastern Slavs "for leaders among the Varangians from across the seas." Alienated from Russian soil, "I flung myself head first into the 'German sea' which was destined to cleanse and renew me."11

WitLthejwolution of 1848, the "German sea" became a "maddening tumult of waves"To7I[ii^oHTmtc¥wpwhose haunted counter-revqlulBol-F ary wriu'ngsMeneTkussiOo^a^aln^ranite cliff" providing Europe wT3T~ its last 'solitary roc¥W7e"fug?T^pm¥7ngulirnenT by revolutionT^ATtfre otheFera^TthTpoTitTc^"s^ectrum, HerzenTooKid not back to this rock but on to "the other shore" that lay beyond the tides of 1848. His famous post-mortem on the events of that year, "From the Other Shore," began with a plea to his son not to remain "on this shore":

Modern man, that melancholy Pontifex Maximus, only builds a bridge-it will be for the unknown man of the future to pass over it.13

Herzen hoped with his friend Proudhon that a new world might be found in which all past suffering would "appear like a magic bridge cast in the river of forgetfulness";14 but he was haunted by the fear that any bridge to the future could only be built-like those of St. Petersburg itself-out of human suffering.

Only in the next student generation after Herzen's, among the "new men" of the early years of Alexander II's reign, were Russians willing to cut themselves loose from traditional moorings and familiar landmarks. Modest Musorgsky, the greatest musician of the age, sounded the call:

To unknown shores, must be our cry, fearless through the storms, on, past all the shallows. … On to new shores, there is no turning back.15

Populist revolutionaries journeyed "down by mother Volga" hoping to sum-mon up the insurrectionary tradition of Razin with such chants as ?

r^'Our bark has run aground. ???? Tsar, our white helmsman, is drunk. jHe has led us straight upon the shoals. ) • • • Let us speed it on its way, / And throw the masters into the water.16

At its surest, fhp, niipst nf mung Russia was that of Dante, who had

used the same metaphor at the beginning of his Purgatorio: '

The frail bark of my ingenuity lifts its sail In order to course over better waters And leave behind so cruel a sea.17

The Russians plunged on oblivious of the prophetic warning that Dante placeTaTtEe beginning of his Paradiso:

? you, who sit within a frail bark . ..

Turn back to gaze upon your native shores:

Do not set out upon the deep:

Lest, in losing me, you should be altogether lost.

The waters that I take were never sailed before.18

stthe image of plunging out into the deep was only a Sad at last DecomeTrTtheearh^ineteennT century a thoroughly" sea-conscious empire. The Pacific Ocean and the BlacFSea offered a host of new outlets for ocearuc^radTlgjraveTfre^^ steai5mTirservice~was openeaTruirSr^ershiirylrTtli^^ charov's famnlTs'ji^niint nf n-roi vnyngp tn T^n in the 1850's, Frigate Pallada^jQfexusd "p a nnw £"""* "f "pa adventures to the Russian reader.19

Uncertain of where they were gpJBg, anxious to find out_whp thex really wereTthe increasinely uprooted intellectuals of the late imperial period came to discoveTlrran^TevelS-qf meaning irTthTsea. It was? for joaje' a__ symbol_of purity and renewal: Keats' "moving waters at their priest-like task'of]we~liblution rourio^earth's human shores." For others, the ocean was the symbol of romantic liberation: Byron's "glad waters of the dark blue sea" in which thoughts were "boundless" and souls were "free."20

An increasingly important, symbolic meaning for the sea in late-nineteenth-century Russia was that ????? "sileilt stranger," tne faceless peasant masses: the narod. The relatively privileged mtellectuals looked"

wideTTread noveL.o£H86i:-and wpoiuthemsekeaJn_thP. way ???? had described the Winter Palace, as

a ship floating on the surface of the ocean [having] no real connection with the inhabitants of the deep, beyond that of eating them.21